Sacrifices will be required, of course: As Barack Obama promised, we are going to be obliged to adopt national policies that will raise our energy bills and thereby lower our standards of living. As Mrs. Clinton insists, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” But a few Elect among us — Al Gore and his compadres, any number of companies that will shortly be vying to lure a retired Barack Obama onto their boards of directors — will become green billionaires, having propitiated the gods. And through the magic of broken windows, we’ll all end up somehow better off as we are obliged to rebuild our energy and manufacturing infrastructure once the holy vandals have had at it.

President Obama is like a beautiful sunrise: each morning, he astonishes anew. Except that the sunrise is beautiful, and President Obama is simply stupid.

That’s the kind gloss on Obama’s latest trip to Paris, where he has repeatedly stated that he is fighting ISIS by sitting in mahogany-paneled rooms eating delicacies with fellow world leaders and chatting about how to hamper global economic growth on behalf of environmentalist redistributionism.

Later:

During his speech, he [Obama] stated, “We stand united in solidarity not only to deliver justice to the terrorist network responsible for those attacks but to protect our people and uphold the enduring values that keep us strong and keep us free. And we salute the people of Paris for insisting this crucial conference go on…What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?”

This is nonsensical to the point of madness. The goal of ISIS isn’t to “tear down our world” to their own material standard – if it were, Obama would be on their side, given his intent to do away with the two greatest engines for the alleviation of poverty in the history of civilization: capitalism and carbon based fuels. Their goal is to replace our civilization with one of their own, barbaric and cruel, theologically rooted in a shared vision of radical Islam.

The Federalist published an excellent article explaining the legal differences between refugees and asylum-seekers, along with the security risks posed by each. The article also explains how the U.S. can, under international law, give preference to refugees of particular religious faiths.

Changing the name of Yale’s Calhoun College, firing me for taking students to a conference at the Ronald Reagan Library, making sure that women with penises can shower next to women with vaginas, expanding the gay and lesbian pride center, and hiring more overpaid busybodies to investigate bias incidents and keep secret files on alleged bigots – none of this will change the angst and suffering of poor black communities across America.

So why is it all happening?

Very simple: there is an election coming up next year. Higher education is a hot topic because of bloated tuitions, ruinous student debt, growing scandals over bogus research, useless curricula, declining academic freedom, and the abuse of an underclass of adjuncts who do most of the teaching.

If we talk about any of these real problems, certain people will have to answer for their misdeeds. Among those responsible, we must count the administrators who have wasted money on administrators and saddled their alumni with debt, the Democrats who have used colleges as their racketeering right arm for decades, and corrupt caudillos of the sort we find peppered on any university campus.

They don’t want to talk about how bad they’ve been for the last fifty years. They’d rather talk about racism. So they partner up with politicians, organizers, grant administrators, rabble-rousers, and garden-variety scum to draw up plans for lots of street distractions. Rile up the commoners. Make it about some racial issue that will get everybody furious and won’t go anywhere or change anything. Fake a hate crime if you have to.

ISIS is sending leaders from Iraq to Surt, Libya, taking over the local affiliate and preparing the city to serve as a fallback in case things go south in Syria and Iraq. Their forces are also approaching the city of Ajdabiya — if they conquer it, they’ll gain oil fields and new revenue.

Kevin Williamson writes on the protests that shut down the shopping district on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue on Black Friday:

It takes a special kind of nose to detect the connection between Cartier shoppers, police shootings of young black criminals elsewhere in Chicago, and the municipal maladministration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but such a nose has the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who can sniff out a payday with the reliability of a French hog hunting truffles. Our friends in the community-organizing racket — whether from Chicago’s South Side or the campus of Yale — are a remarkably consistent bunch: Whatever the real or perceived social problem, the answer is the same: Write a very large check that eventually will make its way into the pockets of such people and organizations as those that organize these protests.

Like this:

Russia started implementing economic sanctions against Turkey and suspended cooperation with Turkey’s military, including the hotline Russia used to communicate information about its Syrian air strikes. Russia claims that Turkey is buying oil and gas from ISIS. Russia also launched heavy air strikes in the area where its Su–24 crashed and one its pilots was killed.

The U.S. investigation into the AC–130 attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz concluded that it was “a tragic accident caused primarily by human error.” The individuals involved have been suspended from duty because they didn’t follow the rules of engagement.

The city of Chicago did a great job keeping the lid on the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. I’m sure the fact that it happened during the run-up to a tight re-election race for Mayor Rahm Emanuel had nothing to do with it. The $5 million the city quickly paid to McDonald’s family may have been factor, though.

Turkish F–16s shot down a Russian Su–24 after it entered Turkish air space for all of 17 seconds; the Su–24 wreckage ended up in Syria. The pilots ejected, but there are conflicting accounts of what happened to them; there are videos online of Turkmen firing AK–47s at the pilots while they’re parachuting to the ground. A different rebel group managed to force down a Russian search and rescue helicopter that went after the pilots; once it was on the ground they blew it up with (an American) TOW missile.

In truth, it was the loud, sometimes shrill, and caricatured voices of talk radio, the so-called crazy Republican House members, and the grassroots loudmouths of what would become the Tea Party who had Obama’s number. They warned early on that Barack Obama’s record was that of a petulant extremist, that his writing presaged that he would borrow and spend like no other president, that his past associations gave warning that he would use his community-organizing skills cynically to divide Americans along racial lines, that nothing in his past had ever suggested anything other than radicalism and an ease with divisive speech, that his votes as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator suggested that he had an instinctual dislike of the entrepreneur and the self-made businessman, and that his past rhetoric advised that he would ignore settled law and instead would rule by fiat — that he would render immigration law null and void, that he would diminish the profile of America abroad, and that he would do all this because he was an ideologue, with no history of bipartisanship but a lot of animus toward his critics, and one who saw no ethical or practical reason to appreciate the more than 60 years of America’s postwar global leadership and the world that it had built. Again, the despised right-wingers were right and the more moderate establishment quite wrong.

Later:

The more contrarian he becomes, and the more he opposes the wishes of the vast majority of the American people, all the more Obama envisions himself speaking truth to power and becoming iconic of something rather than the reality that he is becoming proof of nothing.